What is TEDx?

While helping out at TEDx Canberra 2011 today, at the National Library of Australia (NLA) in Canberra, I was asked "What is TEDx Canberra?". I said that TEDx is a local version of an event where people speak on ideas, which started 20 years ago in California and that this was the second to be held in Canberra. But I was asked what "TED" stood for, so I thought I should look it up:

TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading."

TED was founded in 1984^[1] as a one-off event and the conference was held annually from 1990 in Monterey, California.^{[3] ...}

TED grants licenses to third parties to hold free TEDx events in cities around the world. <sup>[26]

From:</sup> TED (conference), Wikipedia, 11 September 2011 at 18:15.

The first TEDx Canberra was held at the National Library of Aus­tralia on 24 Octo­ber 2010.

Listen and Learn at TEDx Canberra

Greetings from the National Library of Australia (NLA) in Canberra where TEDx Canberra 2011 is on today. The video is being streamed live on-line. It is being vieo streamed live on-line and audio streamed by 666 ABC Canberra Radio. Some segments will be broadcast later on ABC TV Big Ideas.

I volunteered to be on the door. There are about 300 people registered for the event and there was a steady stream of people through the door from 8am for the 9:15 start.

The talk I found most exciting was one of the shortest: three minutes from Emma Davidson on communicating with refugee and indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties.

Annette Zou and Richard Dear talked about ANU XSA, the ANU Cross-disciplinary Stu­dents Acad­emy. This grew out of Professor Ian Young's Vice-Chancellor’s Courses, which emphasize inter-disciplinary sharing.

TEDx Canberra Ready

Greetings from the National Library of Australia in Canberra where TEDx Canberra 2011 starts tomorrow. Speakers are practicing today. I am one of the volunteers helping with odd jobs.

Some of the speakers who got my attention were:

• Michael Engemann and Damien Tonkin
  Damien and Michael are year 12 stu­dents from Dick­son Col­lege in Can­berra. They are design­ing, build­ing and fly­ing UAVs to deliver life-saving res­cue sup­plies to lost tourists stranded in the outback.
• Annette Zou and Richard Dear
  Richard and Annette founded ANU XSA, the ANU Cross-disciplinary Stu­dents Acad­emy in Feb­ru­ary 2011, and are devel­op­ing a Global Cross-disciplinary Tour­na­ment to the held for the first time this Sep­tem­ber. They hope to spread the idea of the ‘cross-disciplinary atti­tude’ to all uni­ver­si­ties around the world.
• Thomas Pogge
  By reform­ing harm­ful supra­na­tional reg­u­la­tions, Thomas Pogge is devel­op­ing a com­ple­ment to the patent sys­tem to stim­u­late phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal inno­va­tions that would be acces­si­ble, with­out delay, to poor and afflu­ent patients alike around the world. A philoso­pher at Yale and the ANU, Pogge works with a stel­lar inter­dis­ci­pli­nary and inter­na­tional team on pilot­ing the HIF idea and get­ting gov­ern­ments to col­lab­o­rate toward its implementation.

TED: Technology, Entertainment, Design

For years people have been mentioning TED to me. But it was only after hearing about it on radio that I signed up (thus the power of old media). TED standards for "Technology, Entertainment, Design" and is a not for profit organisation which has been running conferences since 1984. They now have a web site where anyone can watch videos or inspiring speakers and enter discussions. There are also two annual conferences, in California and Oxford and some in Asia.

TED is not perfect. It has a bit too much of that USA East Coast enthusiasm in it for my liking. Also I had some difficulty with the web site, which is a little too Web 2.0 to work well on my low bandwidth wireless set-up. I was not able to upload a photo for my profile.

While I was at it I ran some tested on the TED home page. It gets a poor score of 30/100 on the W3C Mobile test. The page has 48 errors on a W3C HTML test. It had 4 Priority One and 7 Priority Two problems on the TAW automated Accessibility test. These are things TED need to fix if they want to achieve their aims of speeding ideas more widely across the world.